Rest

Pain Made Visible

I hope you’re finding time to rest in your neck of the woods! How do you rest? What are your ways of resting? I love to listen to music. Lately, I love to watch Jazz Cafe videos on YouTube.

Just like seasons of the year, when Mother Nature rests and resets in the Winter, we also need time to rest regularly in our life.

I figured out in 2018 that I needed to start pacing myself due to my racing heart issues. I paid attention to myself and realized that any time I was active, I had to have adequate rest to recover. I could no longer just push myself constantly and over-ride my body’s signals that I needed to rest.

I had heart surgery (a heart ablation) and I was put on metoprolol, which is something that keeps my heart rate down. It took at least 6 months to heal and see results from the heart surgery.

Getting ready to go into heart surgery, it made me realize (not for the first time, though!) how short our lives here on Planet Earth are. I want to leave a good mark on this world before I exit. I have things I want to write and art I want to create, people I want to meet, places I want to go, things I want to do and accomplish. So much to do, so little time.

Oh, and having heart issues, vision issues, and now mobility issues due to fibromyalgia and other things means I won’t be able to accomplish everything I want to in life, which leads to setting priorities!

My dad talks about setting priorities in our latest book - “Write Your Own Success.”

“You can do absolutely anything you want to do, but you can’t do everything you want to do. This is the dilemma that leads to setting priorities.”

— Stuart F. Crump Jr.

I started learning about pacing myself and practicing it, and over time, I learned that any time I took a trip, I would need at least 3 days after to recover. I now know it can take a week or more to recover from a trip. Trips are worth it for me! Also, if it’s a long trip, I definitely need to plan in a day or three while on the trip just to rest and do nothing all day, including not have to check out of a hotel that day.

I have started to learn my own limits, so I can dial in and be productive when I have the spoons for it, and I am working on not feeling guilty when I need to rest. That’s a work in progress.

I kept getting advertised to by a digital tracker. So a few months ago, I splurged on a sickness tracker called “Visible.” It’s an elastic band with a watch-sized computer that aims lights at your arm and gives you readouts on your phone.

It kind of seems like an Apple Watch, but it has a lot more data.

Here are screen shots from this afternoon:

It has taken me a while to figure out how to interpret this data. Here is how I understand it: a healthy person without physical limitations has 10 spoons they can spend per day. With my disabilities, Visible says I don’t have a full 10 spoons of a normal person. I only have 8 I can spend per day without going over my allotment.

A healthy, normal person getting up, going to the bathroom, making coffee, eating breakfast while staring at their phone and then driving to work - all of that, for a normal person, might take 1/2 a spoon.

For me, the same activities take a lot more spoons. There are times when I am making my morning concoction of instant (decaf) coffee plus instant chai, and my Visible arm band tells me to watch out because I am burning through my allotment for the day.

On days when I am sick or in worse pain than usual, I also burn through the spoons even faster. I can burn 4 spoons just by drinking my morning decaf, feeding my dogs (a super easy task - open container, dish out food, put on floor), and getting dressed. And I haven’t even started the day yet at that point!

This week, I have been battling a lot more pain than normal, and I’ve been fighting to do some things I want to get done. My body is fighting back by giving me more pain than usual. I’m having trouble walking this week and my eyes aren’t focusing as well as I’d like them to. And my brain isn’t thinking nearly as well as it was a few weeks ago. (I would explain that better, but I don’t know how. So, case-in-point.)

Sunday, I was so dizzy that I spent the vast majority of the day in bed. I got up only for water and going to the bathroom. And look how many spoons that took me - 11.3.

Now it’s just 3 hours after I posted the first picture. It’s now nearly 8:30pm. And you can see, despite just mostly sitting here at my table doing stuff on the iPad, I have burned through most of my spoons.

Also, be aware that I don’t get up early either. I got up today after 12:00 noon, and it’s 8:30 pm now. And I won’t be going to bed until probably midnight at the earliest. But my spoons are telling me I’m done.

Also, I haven’t made dinner yet and I’ve only eaten a sandwich today. And my body is screaming in pain right now, begging me to just go lie down in bed.

So I used the bulk of my spoons between noon and 5:30pm.

This bit of technology is telling me to take my life easier. It is telling me to do less and less. I have emotions around this - I’m feeling sad about the fact that I have so little functional time to do anything anymore.

I am also very glad to have the validation that life is just extra hard for me, physically. I’m not imagining this or making it up. It’s science working to help me understand my body.

And I just wanted to share all of that.

It’s important to schedule rest & honor our body’s need for rest. Mother Nature says so, too - like the time She rests in the Winter.

Thank you for reading.